It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Hi, Cannot play the the game longer than 30 mins before they all starve, Why, Please help with hints as the ones i found do not make a difference
avatar
GOSH7: Hi, Cannot play the the game longer than 30 mins before they all starve, Why, Please help with hints as the ones i found do not make a difference
For the first few people, there's a fair bit of work that needs doing, and you'll have to carefully manage your population growth.

First, pick an area, preferably near your starting cart, where you're going to start your town. I like to pause right at the start and lay out a bunch of my initial buildings before any game time has passed. That way I can change things around until I'm happy with my building plans for the first several game years.

First Year needs:
Stockpile
Why?
This is going to hold the wood and stone that you'll be harvesting early. I like a 10x10 as a starter, and it frequently serves as a center point for my new town. This doesn't cost anything to lay out or remove, so go ahead and put one down. Be aware that if you change your mind, it DOES cost worker time to move resources from a stockpile that is in use; try to make sure you're happy with a location before they start using it.

School
Why?
Educated workers are much more productive than uneducated workers. A school should be placed near the houses so students can minimize walking distance and graduate into adulthood faster. The school will extend the time before a new citizen starts working by 6-8 years (in citizen life, not actual game years), but they'll be significantly more productive (+50%?) for the rest of their life. You can finish building it and then wait to assign a teacher until you have a child of age 8 or 9 (just remember to keep an eye on the children's age).

1 house
Why?
You can wait until Summer to finish building this, but make sure it is done by Autumn. Your people need a place to warm up, but they don't need to have their own personal house to do so. People will visit the nearest house when they reach freezing status, so a single house will keep your starting population alive and it will prevent all of the adults from generating a lot of extra children to feed before you're stable.

Add one or two houses each year to keep your population growth steady. Don't create more houses than you have families, or you'll consume extra firewood. Too many houses too fast may create a population boom that could wipe out your food reserve, and not building new housing at all can allow your people to age out of child bearing years and bring trouble many years down the line.

Forester's Hut
Why?
This provides a steady and automated wood income. It also ensures the surrounding area is good for Gatherers. It may take a year or two to start producing, and be aware that the wood income is going to be lower if there is less clear land for trees (so building stuff inside the circle hurts your wood income).

Gatherer's Hut
Why?
This is the easiest and most reliable form of early food. You get several different kinds of food from one building, and the yield is usually pretty good if the coverage circle covers mostly just open land that is being maintained by a Forester (no mountains, no buildings, no water).

Hunter's Hut
Why?
This provides a different kind of food, and it also provides leather for making new clothes. I mostly stick to 3 hunters per hall to make sure I don't wipe out the deer population.

Herbalist
Why?
This helps your citizen's health, and the herbs will be found in the forest anyway. You probably only need one herbalist per building. I've frequently found an herbalist seems to stop finding new herbs in a given area, but that herbalist can still serve medicine to citizens from stockpiled herbs.

2nd year
Wood Cutter
Why?
You should start with enough firewood to supply one house through the first winter, but make sure to get a wood cutter to make more firewood by the second winter and as you're adding new houses. Long term goal: you should have enough wood cutters to restore your firewood supply to whatever limit you set over the course of Spring and Summer, and your firewood limit should be high enough to get you through a winter without much help from active wood cutters. Place Wood cutters near stockpiles that will be receiving wood to minimize travel distance to deliver firewood and get fresh wood to cut. As you add more houses, you'll need more wood cutters (8 are enough to supply 230 stone houses). As you add more wood cutters, you'll need more Foresters.

Blacksmith
Why?
You need to start making extra tools *before* you run out. You start with enough spare tools that the Blacksmith can wait a year (maybe two). Keep an eye on your tool count, and make sure to have a blacksmith done and start them working around the time your citizens are replacing their starting tools. An ideal blacksmith location will be near a stockpile to fetch raw materials and near a storage barn to drop off finished tools.

Tailor
Why?
Same idea as the blacksmith, but for clothes. Your hunters will acquire leather for you which can be used to make hide coats. Leather and coats are both stored in storage barns, so a tailor doesn't need to be near a stockpile.

Storage Barn
Why?
Your starting cart is effectively a storage barn, just with a smaller footprint on the land and with less storage capacity. Don't be too quick to tear the cart down, since it is basically free storage. I am willing to wait a few years before tearing it down, and I typically finally tear it down when I want to put something else in its space. You'll need storage barns as your town grows so you can hold the extra materials to support your growing population.
Post edited March 12, 2023 by Bookwyrm627
Other tips:
-You need about 1/3 to 1/2 of your population gathering food, and you need to make sure you maintain a good stockpile of food so you don't get into a death spiral where citizens spend all their time walking around trying to restock their house with food instead of working to acquire that food they are so desparate to have. Once the death spiral starts, your town is in for a bad (and possibly fatal) time because everyone is still eating, but no one is making food.

-Cluster the Forester, Hunter, Gatherer, and Herbalist together, and place them where the coverage circles overlap each other over a lot of flat ground. The foresters will keep the forest planted, which ensures food spawns for the gatherers to find. As your town grows and takes up more space, deer tend to disappear from where you've been building, so this is a good place for the Hunter as well. The herbs gathered also require trees being around.

-Foresters will automatically spend time clearing stone and iron from their coverage area, so you can get them fully focused on trees by marking the stone and iron for laborers to clear. Make sure you select to harvest just stone and just iron; don't accidently clear cut your trees or the area becomes unproductive for several years while trees are planted and regrow.

-Place your first Forester/Gatherer/Hunter combo a little way outside your starting town to give more coverage without buildings, but not so far that they have a long way to walk for dropping off materials. I like to plant buildings just barely outside the Forester's circle. DO NOT manually clear the trees within the Forester's work circle; this will give you a burst of lumber, but it will hurt productivity for a time while trees regrow. If you need extra lumber, harvest from outside the work circle. These rules of thumb can be ignored as you get more experience, but they are useful while you're learning.

-You can use dirt paths to reduce citizen travel time, but try to minizize their use within your Forester circle (trees can't grow on paths). Don't worry about stone roads until your town is prosperous; dirt costs nothing, but stone must be acquired. Wait a few years before laying roads while your builders have more important work.

-Avoid having multiple Forester huts covering the same area; you don't get anything extra out of the land that is covered twice.

-You can pre-place buildings then put them on pause so your people ignore them. Unpause building when you are ready for the structure to be finished. You can also pre-build most of the structure, then pause it when it is around 90% so you can easily finish it when you actually want it handy (this is great for houses, so you don't build too many).

-Keep a supply of laborers. They cover general tasks like clearing marked resources or moving materials around, and workers are automatically assigned from the laborer pool when someone with a more specific job dies. If there aren't any laborers, then a student is pulled out of school to replace the dead worker (and thus is uneducated).

-Many jobs will do laborer work when their specific job function isn't available. For example, if there is nothing to build, then builders do labor. Farmers do labor during winter and after the harvest, then revert back to farming in the Spring. Wood cutters, blacksmiths, and tailors will do labor if there aren't materials to do their work OR if their production limit has been reached. Some jobs don't have this reversion; a teacher or physician will just man their workplace even if no one needs their services.

-Make sure the work circles for your Forester site don't cross water! You lose workable space to the water, and your citizens might try to take a long (very unproductive) hike to plant a tree on the other side of that water!

-Build houses near work places. This reduces travel time when a citizen gets hungry or cold. The game will take care of reassigning jobs to try and put people doing jobs near their homes, you just need to give it something to work with. I generally put houses for Forester groups just outside the circle if I can; that way the houses don't take up tree space. Same with Storage Barns; put them near work sites to lower travel times.

-This one took me a while to figure out: When assigning labor tasks, especially while your town is very small, only assign work in a single area at a time. A given citizen will go complete a task (cut down a tree), then pick a new task. That new task is frequently somewhere else (they leave the cut wood on the ground as a new task to be assigned). If you assign work areas at opposite ends of your town, you will find workers go cut a tree on one end, then walk across town to pick up stone on the opposite side, then walk back again to pick up something else! That's a lot of waste. You have to adjust to how your workers think. I have yet to figure out whether Banishedurians are the smartest idiots I have ever seen, or the dumbest geniuses.

=====

When the game starts, pause immediately. Choose a location for your first stockpile. Next, choose locations for your Forester, Gatherer, Hunter, and Herbalist, then choose locations for your first few houses, then choose a location for your school.

While you're at it, choose locations for your first storage barn, wood cutter, blacksmith, and tailor.

Pause all of these builings. Priority is on finishing your Gatherer, School, Hunter, and Forester so unpause those first. Once they are done, or when Early Summer starts, unpause a single house. You need the house before the temperature gets cold.

Assign 3-4 people people as builders to get construction going. As soon as your Gatherer hut is done, assign 2-3 people as Gatherers so food starts coming in. When the School is done and when a child is 8 or 9, assign a Teacher. Assign one person as a Forester, and two Hunters (2 gatherers and 2 hunters work for early food). Drop the number of builders as buildings finish; keep around 2-3 people as laborers.

1 teacher, 2 gatherer, 2 hunter, 1 forester, 1 builder, 3 laborers = 10 adults.

You can reduce the number of builders if you don't have many construction projects, or you can increase the number of builders if you have more buildings that need building soon.

Go ahead and pre-build a few houses, but don't complete them. You don't want many houses complete in the first year (you'll end up with more children, and those houses all use firewood, taxing your wood supply and requiring more time spent making firewood), but if your builders aren't working, then they can prebuild things to be finished later.

In the second year, add an herbalist, then fill out your gatherer and forester huts. Also add a blacksmith and tailor.

Add a dock in year 3 or 4 for fishing; a good fishing spot will maximize its water coverage and can provide a steady food source.
Post edited March 12, 2023 by Bookwyrm627
I've attached a screenshot of an example layout for a brand new town. I've drawn a line from each building's id box to its placement on the map. I have 8 adults and 3 children (ages 7, 3, and 3). My starting cart is right near all my (currently homeless) citizens, just west of a house.

First, I plan out my new town.
-Forester Lodge takes priority for placing. You can see how its circle covers the most open ground I can manage right near my starting cart.
-Gatherers Hut is next to it to give more open ground space.
-Hunting Cabin is below Forester as the next spot to give the most area.
-Herbalist has the least priority of the batch.

-A 10x10 Stock Pile is just south, near the coast. It isn't readily apparent in the map, but there is a hill to the west and north east of the stock pile, so I plopped it down in that little open space.
-The Wood Cutter is right next to the stock pile. Get wood, drop off firewood, get wood. Quick cycle.

-I placed a Market to plan for future expansion, but it will be paused for a number of game years. I'm simply marking its space so I can build around where I'll want it in the future.

-Storage Barn is along the market edge, right outside the Forester's work circle. Gatherers and Hunters will both drop off supplies here, so I want it close, but I'm placing somewhat higher priority on keeping forested land available.
-Tailor is just north of Storage Barn. Get leather, drop off coats, get leather, etc.
-Blacksmith is south of the Market. It isn't far from the stockpile (for iron and wood) or the storage barn (drop off tools).

-School house is next to the Storage barn, as just a convenient place to fit the long building.

-Houses are surrounding the future market. Quick access to goods to drop off at home, and they are near several work sites. This area will also eventually host my Town Hall in some fashion; I'm not sure exactly where.

Then I'll start my people working.
1) My first priority will be the Stock Pile (because I can't pause it).
2) After the laborers get close to finishing the stock pile, I'll unpause the School.
3) After the school has been cleared and has nearly all the needed building supplies, I'll assign one laborer as a builder to get started, and I'll also unpause the Gatherers Hut.
4) When the Gatherers Hut is ready for building, I plan to add a second builder (if the school isn't done), and I'll unpause a House (probably the bottom left house) so I'm ready for Winter. When the Gatherers Hut is complete, I'll assign two workers.
->At this point, I have 1-2 builders, 2 people gathering food, and 4 laborers.
5) Next is the Forester Lodge and Hunting Cabin. When those are done, I'll assign 2 hunters and 1 forester.
->For the first year or two, I'll have the Forester focused solely on planting trees, not cutting them, so I get some growth going for the Gatherer to use.
6) Next is the Wood Cutter, then the Blacksmith, then the Tailor.
7) Once those buildings are complete (they'll be fine with no one assigned), I'll get the remaining houses built to around 95% so I can complete them as soon as I feel ready for them.
8) When all this stuff is complete or nearly complete, I'll assign more laborers to jobs (primarily food and forestry). The remaining laborers will be given small clearing tasks to accumulate resources while I don't need their services specifically clearing space for buildings.

Stone and Iron will be harvested primarily from the area within the Forester circle, which will clear space for the Foresters to plant trees. Trees will be harvested primarily from work sites, then from nearby woods that are NOT in the Forester circle.

I've built into the edge of the Gatherer circle, but that space might not have been productive anyway without trees present.

I only started with 3 kids, so I'll want an extra house or two early so kids can be born and start growing up. Not too fast, so I don't overwhelm my current food production. This setup should get me through the first few years, and I'll add more people to food production as children become educated adults.

Any questions?
Attachments:
And here's the town in Year 6, where things are humming along nicely.

I've been managing some of the jobs, like assigning a Tailor or Blacksmith for a time to build up my supply of clothes and tools, then unassigning back into the Laborer pool as those supplies grew and the raw materials shrank. Stone and Iron have primarily been sourced from the Forester circle, while I've been picking out trees from the forest on the other side of the settlement. I have 3 houses sitting at 99% complete until family pairs are available to fill them. Don't build more houses than families, or else your citizens will spread out into the extra houses and use more firewood than is necessary.

I went down to 1 gatherer and 1 hunter in year 2 or 3 when I saw that my food was stably above 1000 with only 1 house. Toward the end of year 3 I added an extra gatherer and hunter again as more houses went up and the supply dropped because citizens stocked their houses.

The herbalist didn't get built until year 4, when I had spare supplies.
Attachments:
year_6.gif (468 Kb)
Menu options: valleys is easier, mountains more difficult. Start options I'd name differently - "advanced" instead of easy (which is a snare and a delusion), "normal" instead of medium, "basic" instead of hard. Try normal/medium.

First thing to do on starting is pause to take stock. You already have a stockpile on this setting, 6x6, which is quite enough - early game, you should be busy taking stuff out of it, not adding more.

Use the big open space in front of the barn for two fields, assign a crop to each (the same seed type if you only have one) and assign two farmers. 8x7 is the largest field meant for one farmer but it won't hurt to be a bit over sized. Think of the food you'll get as a bonus on top of your regular supply from gatherering, more than making up for starting with five families instead of the basic four.

I've seen far too many videos on YouTube of players placing fields that have to be cleared, losing half the planting season.

Place the school, unpause the game and away you go. Put your first gatherers hut in an already well-wooded area. Waiting on foresters planting new trees is too slow. Bookwyrm627's example shows we do have some margin for error here. And as mentioned, do not harvest trees from the hut's circle.

Fishing is the most dependable way to get food, but depends crucially on plenty of deep water (half the circle makes for 6 food per catch, if the fisherman is educated; I'd want better than that) and a very short walk to storage. Hunting adds variety to diet when the staple supply is already sufficient. More important is the leather it provides from which to make coats, but these last four years, so don't worry about that yet. I like to hunt not year round, which can deplete a herd, but from first snow (or earlier in autumn, but after harvest) until the end of winter.
Post edited March 14, 2023 by RSimpkinuk57
Further advice:

Play at x1 speed, watch and learn. The first thing to learn is how often people eat and how much food makes a square meal. When you know how much food each person gets through in a year, you can look at how much is being produced and see whether that is going to be enough.

When looking at building (etc) production statistics, "season" means a whole year, early spring to late winter.

The next thing to learn is how families, houses and their inventories work.

I've never had to use the one-house lord-and-lady-of-the-manor strategy. From a 4-families start I've usually got them all into homes of their own before the first winter. On an exceptionally bad seed result I might just resort to a boarding house (because then all food and fuel is held in common, making a woodcutter unnecessary for two or three years).
Interesting!